Dark Mofo sucked me into her web and blown away by the festival! Dark Mofo now in its 6 year started by the creative minds up the river at MONA (Museum of Old and New Art) as a festival to celebrate winter solstice (it is the Southern hemisphere, so their seasons are opposite ours in the states & felt great in the 50's cool, crisp air), taking their longer nights and filling with art, music, food and drink. All of downtown Hobart is illuminated in red light, city buildings, the main bridge, all sorts of businesses the energy is amazing. The winter feast at the waterfront open Fri-Sun 4-10pm taking over the Princes Wharf is a delight to see, you can purchase a nightly pass for early admission prior to 8pm as it fills up or I purchased a weekend pass for $50 AU which allows admission for both weekends. It is free after 8pm and that only gets you in, you will need cash or all took credit for the food and drink. Walking in and seeing the building transformed in red, all of the food stalls - anything you can imagine from Hobart and all over Tassie's finest chefs/restaurants, craft breweries, wineries, distilleries with music, performance artists and thats just inside, outside you can also find tons of food being prepared over open flames. Tons of fun people watching, trying new foods. I loved the rainbow gnocchi (beet root, kale, charcoal and garlic) with gin sauce from Valie nella Locca and the Chutney potatoes from Daily Potato Co. Each day you can go & try something new. Dark Park is setup on the Northern side of the warehouse area filled with a variety of art illuminating the night, plus bands and more food and drink from various vendors, its right by Hobart Brewing Company. Plus there are free art shows throughout the city at Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Salamanca Place and separate ticketed shows at the Mac2 warehouse wharf - I saw St. Vincent on Friday night shred the town and Laurie Anderson on Wed night and Einstürzende Neubauten on Saturday night at the Odeon. There's also a late night ticketed event Night Mass on Friday and Saturday night 10pm-2pm where they shut down a city block & you wander through a maze of buildings, seeing art, dj's, bands. I enjoyed Friday night and Saturday was sold out despite the pouring down rain. Make your way to Hobart, Tasmania, Australia for Dark Mofo and be transformed through art, music, food and beverage, you'll never think of winter solstice in the same way. read more

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Dark Mofo may be MONA FOMA's younger and darker sibling festival, but as far as favouritism goes, keep me in the dark. I spent the period of time between June 13th and 23rd, 2013, crushing harder than ever before on my beautiful new city. Ryoji Ikeda's overwhelming Spectra installation became the town's new obsession. People loved it. People probably hated it, too, but I don't really talk to those people. Because I loved it. "Imagine a tower of pure, white light, reaching fifteen kilometres into the Hobart sky above the Domain. At the base of the tower, forty-nine custom-made Xenon searchlights are set into the ground in a seven-by-seven grid; combined, they point a fleshless finger at our town straight down, it seems, from some sort of imagined, omniscient seat in the sky. Sine waves - the purest kind of sound wave - form invisible sonic patterns at the base; your movement alters their composition in a way that only you can specify. Indeed, your experience is unlike your friends', or anyone else's at all. Now, stop imagining, and wait until nightfall." Spectra wasn't the only thing to marvel at. How about ZEE, the installation in the Beam in Thine Own Eye exhibition down at MAC1, where each person who went in had to sign a risk acceptance form due to the high number of health warnings... and yet STILL within the first few days of operating, ZEE had caused seven or more people to pass out? Look, you either got ZEE or you didn't. By the end of the exhibition (which ran an extra month after the festival, too!) I'd been through the installation four times. FOUR TIMES. I was crazy about it. Ian Burns' "Afloat Asunder" installation also ran for a bonus extra month after the festival, too... hidden in the basement of TMAG, it was a beautiful and calm display of some incredible lightbulb machines. That's a really banal way to describe it, but I'm no artist myself. I was just happy to stand spellbound while the machines did their thing. EVER NEVER WHERE NEVER HOW NEVER WHAT NEVER. You had to be there... Then there was the Winter Feast, putting all other food festivals before it (sorry, Taste...) to shame with its extravagant and sumptuous feasting. So many fires for warmth! Musos doing intimate little campfire gigs! Delicious morsels on offer from so many Tasmanian vendors! And who could go past the Global BBQ's $25 tasting plate? Not gonna lie, I did NOT go get my $5 back for the return of the plate. I have a lovely enamel keepsake in my cupboard now, instead. I also went slightly mad for Lost Pippin's Winter Queening cider, which was an absolute bargain compared to the Rekorderlig cropping up in corners of the festival (what was the deal there, anyway... some sort of sponsorship biz?). MONA herself got involved with a till-midnight opening for her current exhibit, the Red Queen. To be honest, that was probably my least mesmerised moment of the festival--so, so busy... and for something I can go out and see at any time in the next few months, really. It wasn't quite as amazing a night as it was billed to be. (Though I did randomly cross paths with David Walsh's fluffy white cat, Christ, so the evening wasn't a complete fizzer for me.) Back to the raving, though. Vandemonian Lags! The amazing stage performance about tales of convicts past that everyone desperately wants to come back for a longer run! I was there the night that Tim Rogers was still miked up when he went offstage and straight to the gent's. That'll go down in history. But what a stunning show! I'll even admit to getting a bit misty-eyed during a touching moment or two. And laughing my guts up during Sex Hospital. Look, I didn't even get to many other things. Can you believe it, after reading this review? But I was so happy with what I DID see, and I can only hope this festival returns for years to come, as captivating as this debut. I went up to the summit of Mt Wellington on the final night of Dark Mofo, to say my farewells to Spectra. It was bitterly cold, but I was prepared... unlike many of the others who had the same idea as me. The colder people are, the more swear words seem to be magically elicited from their mouths. In any case, that freezing night on the mountain was the perfect way to end the festival. When the next evening rolled around and Spectra wasn't shooting up into the sky, I felt a little pang in my heart. Thank you, Dark Mofo. read more

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